1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for searching and browsing multimedia, and more particularly, to a video skimming system capable of skimming video data based on the information content of the video data.
2. Description of the Related Art
As mass media has progressed and the production of multimedia contents has become easier, the quantity of video and audio media information received by the general public every day has become substantial. As multimedia contents have become enormous, a desire for an automatic system for sorting data requested by a user has increased and the study of methods for complying with such request has also increased. Particularly, with the development of digital technology, there is a growing trend in which a video content is stored and distributed in a digital format. When digital broadcasting becomes popular, the digitalization of media will be accelerated.
With such a digital video content, a certain user may wish to view only sports-related news, or another user may wish to view business-related news. In addition, a certain user may request for viewing only scenes in which a particular person appears in a show program. In order to cope with such various kinds of user requests, various studies are being made.
Moreover, a user may request to grasp the full video contents within a limited time. Such a request is accepted by “Highlights.” Generally, highlights can be understood as a newly configured content of important scenes from a video content. This includes, for example, “Sports Highlights”, “Preview of Movie”, “Headline News” and the like. However, in current technologies, it is very difficult to automate the extraction of highlights from a video content. Thus, in most cases, this extraction is manually performed. As mentioned above, as the quantity of media has been increased explosively, many human powers are needed to manually provide highlights of every video content, which is almost impossible. Therefore, an automation system is needed in order to allow a user to understand the outline of the content within a short time.
With the development of digital technologies, a key frame is used to move to a desired position in a video content. By using a video summary using the key frame, a user can move to a desired person rapidly. A large number of key frames are needed in order to easily search for a desired section by using the key frame, but it is difficult to display a large number of key frames in a limited display space. Thus, the user is requested to perform many selection works. In addition, generally, it is difficult to understand the fall content of video by the method using a key frame.
Recently, for searching for a desired scene in a digital video, various video indexing techniques are being studied. For a user wanting only scenes in which a particular person appears, the study of indexing information on the appearance of a person by the process of searching for a scene in which the person appears in a video and recognizing who the person is and the study of extracting principal scenes from a movie or sports and indexing the same are being made. However, the genres of video are very various and data to be indexed are very different by genres. Hence, it is known that it is very difficult to implement an automation system for extracting meaningful information with accuracy of high level by the current techniques.
On the other hand, in digital video, unlike analog video, the degradation of image quality can be prevented when fast wind/fast rewind functions are executed.
As a fast reproduction method generally used in a digital video, a method for increasing a number of frames decoded per unit time and displaying parts thereof, or a method for decoding and displaying frames while skipping a certain section is used.
However, in the method for increasing the number of frames decoded per unit time, it is disadvantageous in that the maximum speed is affected by the performance of a terminal device. Thus, for the fast wind/fast rewind of a digital video, the method for decoding and displaying frames while skipping a certain section is used. The fast wind/fast rewind technique in the digital video is the most reasonable one of existing techniques for complying with the request of the user wanting to understand the full content within a restricted time or wanting to move to a desired section. However, predetermined intervals of time are used in skipping a certain section, and thus there is a disadvantage that the user misses the scene of a desired section or a less important section is reproduced relatively often.